Cyclical Ruins
by Mitsima
Summary: Starts off with Tenpou. That's all I can say for now- that and the fact that this is wierd and twisted. Say...he finds unlikely company.


Cyclical Ruins  
  
"And if he left off dreaming about you..."  
  
-Lewis Carol  
  
*****  
  
Day after day, he tried the doorknob of his prison.  
  
Day after day, it never relented.  
  
//The gods are merciful, to have enclosed me forever within familiar walls; or at least an illusion of them.//  
  
"This is exile," the man thought with neither surprise nor fear, as if this were the fate he had been waiting for all his long life.  
  
Day after day, he contemplated his familiar surroundings (or perhaps the merciful illusion of them because surely this was some limbo between life and death, space and time, the non-place to incarcerate the non-entity) until one day, he lost hope; and to forget that he had lost hope, he decided to lose himself among his books.  
  
Desk pushed up against the door, he passed hundreds of years in this manner.  
  
Voices seeped through the cracks of these windowless walls: sometimes the sweet murmurings of a gentle woman but more recently, they were shrieks of the dying. The man looked up from his scrolls with mild annoyance, adjusted his glasses, and then returned to his studies.  
  
"Comparatively speaking," he said to the inanimate pieces of literature before him as if used to having someone listen to his ranting. "One may assume that this little prison of mine is the only safe haven from such rampant ghosts." Better than out there, but if the boredom drove him to desperation, he could always invite them in.  
  
Now about that doorknob...even the devil himself would have been less stubborn.  
  
Tenpou was almost content, despite the tragedy of things. "Yes, quite safe."  
  
****  
  
He had lost track of time and the only change he noted was the tap tap tap of rain all around him, echoing in his hollow box of a room. It was at times like this that Tenpou would have preferred to have a window...anything...that could facilitate even the smallest view of the outside.  
  
The sound of rain falling on his empty cell of a library was pierced by empty footsteps-  
  
Tap tap tap tap tap  
  
- from outside and the resounding soft thunder of doors being opened and closed.  
  
//So my cell isn't the only one. Comforting, but not very. //  
  
The footsteps got louder, as did the squeaks and desperate slams of doors. Tenpou could hear heavy breathing and hoarse curses, followed by the cries he thought had faded away. Someone was being hunted down apparently.  
  
Strange, he thought, that in this state of static suspension between worlds someone would still possess primal fear of obliteration even though -this- was the very state of obliteration. Or perhaps one's state of mind remains intact regardless of being disembodied, that one might not realize said disembodiment until one's non-flesh is painlessly, harmlessly pierced...given that postulate, could such a state of death be a relative...  
  
A crash outside his door caused Tenpou to jump. The door swung open and hit the desk that blocked it, causing delicately balanced mounds of books to topple. Without a second thought, the god shoved his desk aside and dragged in the panting body that crumpled at his feet.  
  
Tenpou contemplated the open door and before he could even touch the knob, the man behind him jumped up and shut the blasted thing. Tenpou tried the knob, but it- as ever- did not open for him.  
  
"No! No. No. NO!" the man muttered, taking his hand and pulling him away from the entrance with the shaky grip of one who was on the verge of a breakdown.  
  
The marshal put his ear to the door and heard nothing. "Perhaps," he suggested inoffensively. "The stress has caused you to hallucinate?"  
  
"A hallucination would have been preferable." the man said as he put a hand to his abdomen, absentmindedly looked down and clenched, then looked back at his hand in disgust.  
  
Tenpou thought of offering him some tea, or wine, but he realized soon enough that he hadn't any. Haven't had any for hundreds of years. They stood there, Tenpou pensively leaning against the door and the other regaining his composure a few yards away.  
  
For a while neither said anything until Tenpou heard a quiet "thank you" escape the stranger's lips.  
  
"Your welcome. It's been a while since I've had company here anyway. Perhaps I should thank you for stopping by- not that it was a courtesy call in the first place. Hell has a strange way of working us."  
  
"Heaven too."  
  
"There's no need to lecture me on heaven. I know well enough."  
  
The stranger smiled wryly back at him, pained yet bitterly amused. "Then you have no place lecturing me on the ways of hell. I too know well enough."  
  
In that moment, something happened. Like a shattered mirror that spontaneously put itself back together. The cracks fused themselves and Tenpou saw what he never thought he'd ever see in the other man: himself. "What is your name?"  
  
"Cho Gonou."  
  
Doesn't he see this?  
  
Gonou's eyes betrayed nothing but the same weighty self-disgust he had stumbled in with. The way he breathed, the shallow breaths, the trembling, the way he stood: like a moth being consumed in flames, withering away and disappearing by the second- gave him the look of someone who was bleeding all over although Tenpou saw no blood.  
  
"Tenpou Gensui." But he had barely uttered much more than a syllable when Gonou let himself slip into the darkness he seemed to be fighting away, collapsing, and this time caught by his own image.  
  
****  
  
Tenpou never slept, and therefore had no bed. Or maybe he had no bed, and therefore never slept. The problem was where to put Cho Gonou. He settled for the floor, removing his lab coat and propping it under the other man's head as a pillow. Before long, Gonou woke up again in a sweat, eyes unfocused, "Kana Kana" he was breathing more than shouting, in mourning, not ecstasy. "Don't." Then, "Let's go home." Then-  
  
"Somebody kill me."  
  
Tenderly, Tenpou wiped away the sweat that beaded on Gonou's forehead, allowing his hand to linger for a moment on moist skin that grew hotter to the touch. Narcissism at it's worst, Tenpou admitted to himself with twisted mirth. The exponentially worsening feverishness- Tenpou found himself envying Gonou for it, for being able to bring himself to such an extreme psychological intensity that his body was being consumed in the process. So unlike Tenpou himself, who simply knew how to live but not *live*. Nothing touched him. Not his own thoughts. Not his own motives- for he had none. Not anybody because fire didn't exist in heaven. Prometheus gave the flame of culture to the humans. Little did he know that the hearth of Olympus extinguished behind him.  
  
What salvation was there for it? As if the air of heaven were colder than it felt and all the gods there lived in a perpetual winter, an eternal hibernation of frozen freedoms. Desire went as far as a frosty breath, then vanished in a misty haze before unsurprised eyes.  
  
Gonou moaned softly, incoherently. Pressed his face against the cold hand against his cheek. His warmth had the effect of sweet wine and Tenpou's head began to swim. Images. Things he shouldn't think about. Words. Things he should never say. Uncalled for wantings he should never provoke. Never give in to. Warmth in his cheeks. Warmth in his groin. This was the ultimate narcissism- a desire for the one you never were- and ideally had hoped to be.  
  
He wanted this fever too. "What's one more demon to add to your troubles?" Tenpou whispered into the other's ear, his lips brushing lightly against them.  
  
"Sometimes one more is one too many." Gonou said, and gasped as a hand reached under his shirt. "But if it is heaven's will, it seems that I have no choice."  
  
His eyes wide open, Gonou seemed to be looking at things that weren't there. Perhaps imagining things that have already passed and his lips formed words that he never said. Perhaps too stricken, too engulfed in his own nightmares, too pained at the memory of green eyes and chestnut brown hair hovering over him. Tenpou wouldn't have known that Gonou's narcissism matched his own. One coldly searing kiss started it all.  
  
And so like broken mirrors, they crookedly reflected one another.  
  
Drunk on desire, guilt, freedom...the want for once last kiss, the want for a very first.  
  
****  
  
He woke up shivering and with a fever. Someone kicked him. "Hey, you still alive?"  
  
He opened his eyes. He smiled. Another stranger. 


End file.
